ARMENIAN HORRORS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LII, Issue 16034, 28 September 1915, Page 8

ARMENIAN HORRORS.

UNPRECEDENTED SAVAGERY

SLAUGHTER OF THOUSANDS.

DEPORTATION AND MASSACRE London, September 26. Awful stories of cruelty to Armenians are related by eye-witnesses. The London Daily Chronicle says: History contains no records of such scenes. Besides many thousands who were killed, half a million Armenians were deported at the beginning of last April. The first step was disarming, under pretext of which many Armenians were murdered, tortured, or imprisoned en masse. Deportations followed, accompanied by massacres, till scarcely a man was left. The Turks in Kharput province marketed the remainder, from the highest functionary to the simplest peasant. They bought the wives, forcibly converting them to Islamism. Little children were put upon the roads, and wandered famished, until many died of starvation. Similar scenes occurred in the Diarbekir province. Some facilities were granted the deportees in other provinces, but robbers and peasants looted and stripped the caravans, killed the few remaining youths, abducted the women and girls, and whipped old women along the roads until they dropped from exhaustion and died of hunger. An states that the women who were deported from Erzeroum province left Kharput Plain without food, and dfed at the rate of 50 or 60 a day. A little girl states that when a caravan arrived at the Governor's office at Sari Kichila the children were torn from their mother's arms, and the caravan was forced to continue without them. As the refugees arrived at each village the women were exposed at the Governors' offices to allow Mussulmans to take their pick. The caravan, starting at Papert, gradually dwindled, and finally the remaining women and children were thrown into the Euphrates before Erzinga. Two German Red Cross nurses were so shocked that they resigned and reported the atrocities to the Embassy at Constantinople. The roads in many provinces were littered with corpses. A Mussulman traveller states that during a nine hours' journey from Malaria to Sivas he encountered only corpses of men, and women. Armenian soldiers met the same fate at Erzeroum and Diarbekir, where they were sent to work on the roads, and then butchered. Eighteen hundred from Kharput were massacred. Many Armenians sought to be converted to Islamism to escape their co-religionists' " fate. Those at Sivas were notified that they must first surrender their children for education. The authorities at Kharput ordered that women desiring conversion must first marry Mussulmans. Many threw themselves into the Euphrates with their babies. Evidently the Government is determined to end the Armenian question once and for all by extermination.